Category Archives: proof

MaBloWriMo 29: Equivalence classes are cosets

Posted on November 30, 2015 by

Today will conclude the proof of Lagrange’s Theorem! Recall that we defined subgroups and left cosets, and defined a certain equivalence relation on a group in terms of a subgroup . Today we’re going to show that the equivalence classes … Continue reading →

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MaBloWriMo 28: Equivalence relations are partitions

Posted on November 29, 2015 by

Today we’ll take a brief break from group theory to prove a fact about equivalence relations, namely, that they are the same as partitions. A partition is a pretty intuitive concept: you take a big set, and cut it up … Continue reading →

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MaBloWriMo 27: From subgroups to equivalence relations

Posted on November 28, 2015 by

Again, let be a group and a subgroup of . Then we can define a binary relation on elements of , called , as follows: if and only if there is some such that . That is, for any two … Continue reading →

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MaBloWriMo 26: Left cosets

Posted on November 27, 2015 by

Let be a group and a subgroup of . Then for each element we can define a left coset of by . That is, is the set we get by combining (on the left) with every element of . For … Continue reading →

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MaBloWriMo 25: Subgroups

Posted on November 26, 2015 by

So in the remainder of the month, we’ll prove that in any group , the order of each element must evenly divide the order (size) of the group. I said in an earlier post that this is called Lagrange’s Theorem; … Continue reading →

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MaBloWriMo 23: contradiction!

Posted on November 24, 2015 by

So, where are we? We assumed that is divisible by , but is not prime. We picked a divisor of and used it to define a group , and yesterday we showed that has order in . Today we’ll use … Continue reading →

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MaBloWriMo 22: the order of omega, part II

Posted on November 23, 2015 by

Yesterday, from the assumption that is divisible by , we deduced the equations and which hold in the group . So what do these tell us about the order of ? Well, first of all, the second equation tells us … Continue reading →

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